Colin: Don’t be silly.
John: You’ve passed the years of adventure, and you want to settle down. So you say: “Ah, I’m wise and sane and right, and all you poor young people are wrong.”
Frankie (very much at John): Do you think you know all about it because you’re wrong?
John: We couldn’t very well make a worse mess than they have, could we?
Frankie: I’m not so sure.
John: Oh, Frankie! If we sat down with a pencil and paper and tried to work out a really unclean, intolerant, silly system, we couldn’t work out a worse one than exists to-day. Do you realise that?
Frankie: No, I don’t.
John: I could make you.
Gwen: Try—go on.
John: Well—to start with ... the obvious things. (He talks without difficulty, speaking what he has thought about.) Hundreds of thousands of girls on the streets; and an incredible amount of sex disease. One in every five infected! A million or so girls more than men doomed to a life without love. Some millions of separated people living without love and not allowed to marry again. Thousands of marriages where only distaste, and hate, remain. Ugliness, and cruelty, and intolerance about the whole subject that makes the sum of unnecessary suffering almost incredible. Does all that sound like a success? After all, we’re responsible to the next generation for the sort of world they’ll find. Have we any right to say, “Oh, that’s all right; we can’t do better than that. We needn’t bother”? Look at all the girls in the world, Frankie—one lot selling themselves to any man who can pay them; the rest brought up in a sort of prison of asceticism, as candidates for the privilege of becoming a man’s married housekeeper.